"A New Hope For Indie Games" - ProjectMQ

InnovationGame discovery is patently broken. This makes it difficult for gamers to find/buy quality games, and for indie studios to sell their games. ProjectMQ solves both problems by curating the best indie games from around the world. We've built an invitation-only social media app where our users can discover high-definition multimedia from the best indie games worldwide. ProjectMQ works on any device, so our users can enjoy our app anytime, anywhere. ProjectMQ creates a unique social experience for gamers that's entertaining and informative.

ProjectMQ tailors the media experience for each user through a robust content discovery system. We've designed ProjectMQ to integrate with 3rd party sites (Amazon, Gamestop, etc.) via APIs, which helps convert user media consumption into retail transactions. This gives our users a variety of convenient opportunities to buy or rent an indie game that they discover with our service. ProjectMQ’s patented system maximizes user engagement, creating a unique experience that no other app has.

ManufacturabilityProjectMQ is a digital product, and the team members are building it in-house, so creating and distributing it has a relatively low material cost. Our design patent for ProjectMQ’s user interface has been allowed by the UPSTO, and we expect the patent will be issued August 2016. To get to market more quickly, we’ve launched our prototype at https://www.projectmq.com. Once we finish the prototype’s alpha release, we’ll begin A/B testing with a small user group, so that we can launch ProjectMQ in private beta Summer 2017.

Instead of buying ads, we’re leveraging growth hacking strategies and social communities to organically grow ProjectMQ’s audience. Our Twitter account now consistently generates more than 2M impressions per month. In 10 months, we organically grew ProjectMQ's Twitter audience from 886 to more than 15K followers; our average monthly growth rate for that period was 33%. Based on a 15% monthly growth rate and our product/market fit, we anticipate that ProjectMQ will have 28K users in FY17, 150K users in FY18, and 800K users by FY19. We launched our prototype in October 2015, and the site's been live about 9 months. We now have more than 3000 pieces of media (audio, videos, and images) from 250+ incredible indie studios in 50+ countries around the world.

Twitch is a great success story for gaming media, and validates ProjectMQ's marketability; Twitch started out in 2007 simply as a gaming channel on the media streaming site Justin.tv [http://www.justin.tv]. In February 2014, Twitch was the fourth largest source of Internet traffic during peak times in the United States, behind Netflix, Google, and Apple. On August 2014, Amazon announced plans to acquire Twitch for nearly $1 billion [http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/26/technology/amazon­nears­a­deal­for­twitch.html]. Twitch now has more than 10 million monthly visitors, and averages 7+ hours of monthly content watched per viewer.

Marcus is inspired by:
Video games inspire my designs, because they set the standard for intuitive interfaces and entertaining experiences. I share our exciting startup journey with ProjectMQ at https://projectmq.silvrback.com